Routes, Planning, & Inspiration for Your North American Road Trip

Getting
Out There:
RoadTrip News & Views

The
Wilderness Beach: A Down-Island Drive on Texas' National Seashore,
by Aaron Reed

On
an off-road trek along the Gulf of Mexico in southernmost
Texas, Aaron Reed encounters many memories and a mystery.
The memories are familiar -- fishing with his grandparents,
nursing the injuries of a misspent youth -- but what is
that orange stuff out in the water?

The
writer's mother finds scarce shade at Padre Island
National Seashore two years before his birth.

The
entrance booth at Padre Island National Seashore
is open during daylight hours, and park rangers
are happy to answer questions about beach conditions.
The park itself is open to the public 24-hours-a-day,
365-days-a-year.

A
volunteer holds the skull of an Atlantic bottlenose
dolphin as she walks visitors through the ecology
of the island.

Semi-primitive
camping, providing only toilets, rinse showers,
picnic tables and 50 designated sites including
26 sites for tent or RV camping and 16 sites for
RV's only is available at Malaquite Beach. An
$8 fee is required; $4 with a Golden Age or Golden
Access passport. There are no hook-ups. There
is a gray water dump station and potable water
filling station prior to entering the campground.
Camping is accommodated on a first-come, first-served
basis. No reservations are accepted. According
to the National Park Service, the campground is
rarely full; during fall, winter, and spring usually
less than half the sites are occupied. During
all seasons, some RV campers opt for primitive
camping on the beach.

Due
to its location only several hundred miles north
of the Tropic of Cancer, the seashore sports blooms
of one variety or another nearly year-round.

Surf
fishing is a popular pastime on the island, and
anglers successfully take sharks, black drum,
redfish, pompano, whiting, spotted seatrout, jack
crevalle and the occassional snook or tarpon among
other species.

Pete
followed a ghost crab burrow about a foot under
the sand before giving up to investigate something
else. The National Park Service likes to see all
pets on leashes; rattlesnakes and coyotes are
just a couple of the critters that call the island
home and both can put a damper on your dog's day.

During
some seasons, Portuguese Man-of-Wars -- also known
as "bluebottles," make swimming and
wading hazardous. They also make driving down
the beach an experience akin to riding on bubble
wrap.

Over the last 30-plus years, I've made the drive
down Padre
Island National Seashore 90 times? A hundred? A
hundred and twenty? I honestly don't know. A bunch of times,
though -- from the earliest days of my childhood. This wilderness
beach on the Gulf of Mexico, in the southernmost part of Texas,
sometimes seems like a map of my life. It's here I saw the
three coyote pups playing at the water's edge (1976), watched
the sky darken with the flight of peregrine falcons (1983),
punctured the air mattress, sleeping on sand (2006). I know
this stretch of coastline well. It's a point I am at pains
to make to Tamara as her frown deepens one Saturday in January.

"Really, I know what I'm doing," I
tell her patiently. "There are no surprises for me down
here it's like my second home. We'll be fine."

I'm not making much headway.

"In South Carolina, we don't really drive
on the beach," she tells me, again. South Carolina
-- Folly
Beach, to be specific -- is where her grandparents lived
and the family still vacations.

"I guess I thought we were driving to
the beach, then getting out."

"We'll get out," I assure her. "Let's
just get to a spot where we'll have the beach to ourselves."

It's not hard to find that spot in what the National
Park Service claims is the longest remaining stretch of undeveloped
barrier island in the world. The park itself is 70 miles long,
encompassing more than 130,000 acres of sand, grass, mud flats
and stunted trees.

We're headed "down island," past the
"4x4 Only" warning sign at milepost 5, all the way
to the East Cut -- the southern end of the park. Depending
on your point of view, it's 60 miles of nothing or
60 miles of glorious wilderness.

"Everyone traveling down island should
remember above all else that they will be in an isolated area
many miles from the nearest facilities and possibly from the
nearest person," warns the National Park Service.

It's part of the park's effort to make sure you
get it: There are washouts, and treacherous deep sand, rattlesnakes,
occasional narcotics traffickers, debris that could puncture
your tires - or worse; what's more, cell-phone service is
spotty or nonexistent. In other words, once you pass the sign,
you're pretty much on your own.

Right. That's why we're here.

Getting there

We drive in from Austin on a Friday, after work,
making the 200-or-so miles of our favorite
route to the coast in about three and a half hours. Friday
night we crash at the home of the hindmost Reeds -- the cadet
branch of the family, my decade-younger brother, John, and
his wife, Stephanie -- in Ingleside.

Saturday we wend our way through Portland and
over to Corpus Christi. We stop at Academy Sports and Outdoors
for a pair of shorts for Tam and a handful of fishing lures
for me. We stop at the supermarket for snacks, then go through
the drive-through at Whataburger
for lunch. We cross the Laguna
Madre on the JFK Causeway, and -- at the populated, northern
end of Padre Island -- stop one more time for bottled water
and gas.

Much to my surprise, there's a line at the entrance
to the park. We pay $10 for a seven-day pass (the annual pass
is only twice that), and I check the dry-erase board, scanning
for highlights. Water temperature: 59 degrees. Driving conditions:
fair. Debris: little. Seaweed: little. Beachcombing: poor.
And, most importantly: High tide at 7:12 p.m., Low tide at
11:50 p.m.

We stop in at the Malaquite
Visitor Center, where a mostly-empty parking lot holds
a couple of dozen vehicles bearing license plates from places
like Nebraska and New Mexico, Kansas, New Jersey and Vermont.
Texas, too, of course. On the deck, a volunteer is standing
before a table covered with beach treasures, holding the skull
of an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin. She's giving a "deck
talk" to a group of what appear to be retirees. It's
free, and part of the regular program here.

In the gift shop, we peruse a small museum display
of astrolabes and anchors, stone points and fishing floats.
A stuffed Western diamondback rattlesnake is coiled behind
Plexiglas, as if ready to strike. A table displays a fiberglass
replica of a Kemp's Ridley sea turtle laying eggs. The island
is the major nesting site in the United States for the world's
most endangered sea turtle.

A magnetic board on the wall reiterates down-island
beach conditions. I note the time of the next high tide again
and decide we'd better head out.

Memories and a mystery

We take a left out of the parking lot and a short
distance later the pavement ends. I click the trip odometer
and we cruise at a sedate 15 mph past travel trailers and
RVs nestled in the dune line. After the first five miles,
after the warning sign, the beach becomes sparsely populated.
Every mile or two we pass a hardcore surf fisherman or a family
tent-camping above the high-tide line.

Then, at about mile 15, there is nobody ahead
of us. We pull up next to a half-buried cable spool. It's
buried the right way up and makes a dandy picnic table. Pete,
our recently adopted Catahoula
leopard dog, explores the area around the car. We break
out the snacks and a couple of icy beers.

Legs stretched, tide line investigated, we load
the dog and continue south.

We drive through the section of the island called
Little Shell, and I have to pay attention. Up next: Big Shell,
named for the polished and multicolored shell fragments piled
on the beach here. Driving on this part of the beach is tough,
and we're not in one of the mammoth, high-clearance four-by-fours
most visitors favor here. While the tide is out, we can make
good time on the hard-packed, wet sand near the water's edge.
I cross up and over a couple of times, trying out the all-wheel-drive
on the looser stuff near the dune line. If we come back while
the tide's up, this route will be our only option.

Memories surface as we drive deeper into the
down-island wilderness of the park. Somewhere along here,
I think, is where my buddy Steve and I took turns towing each
other through the surf on a kneeboard behind his Suzuki Samurai.
That was, when? 1985 or 1986.

And here, didn't there used to be an old Gulf
shrimp boat on the sand, tossed ashore by a tropical storm?

Somewhere around milepost 25 we pass the spot
where my 1978 Mercedes 240D finally bogged down. It was 1990,
the summer between my first and second junior years in college.
I was heartbroken after a relationship with a lovely girl
had finally fizzled and wanted to "get away from it all."
I had a surfboard and a cooler of beer.

It took about 24 hours -- sometime after the
ice melted and the mosquitoes came out -- for me to realize
I wasn't very good company to myself. Besides, the Gulf was
flat as a mill pond. I flagged down a huge four-by-four truck,
and the eight guys riding in the bed muscled my car out of
the deep, soft sand. I drove back into Corpus Christi, hung
a left, and somehow ended up in Tampico in the company of
three guys from British Columbia.

Mile 35.7: Tamara looks past me and points: "What's
that, out there?"

I slow the Subaru and look out the driver's side
window. On the second sandbar, a wave is breaking orange.
Bright orange. I stop the car.

"I have no idea," I say. "It's
not red tide - wrong time of year. I don't see any dead fish.
It doesn't stink. It kind of looks like paint in the water,
doesn't it?"